Openly Local is a recently launched “first draft of getting hold of and making accessible local government data in a consistent and useful form”.

There is generally a lot of support for open data from central government in the UK – particularly from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Cabinet Office and with Gordon Brown’s recent announcement that he is asking Tim Berners-Lee to help open up government data in the UK. We are pleased to see that OKF Director Rufus Pollock’s call for Raw Data Now, which Sir Tim cited in a talk at TED, has played a prominent part in his advice!

However, open government data does not seem to receive such attention in local government.

Openly Local has made a start on opening up local government data:

To start off, I’ve concentrated on getting the basic information — current councillors, committees, membership of those committees, and minutes for those committee meetings. I started off with a little over a dozen councils (though that’s since increased to over 40 of them).

At the time of writing this includes information on: 61 councils, 3797 councillors, 2065 committees and 11922 committee meetings.

We’d love to hear examples of local government data that is already explicitly open – and suggestions for local government data that you’d like to be made open!

Related posts:

1. Euro Directive on Re-Use of Public Sector Information: What Is Actually Happening at the Local Level? John Gray has recently been conducting some rather interesting research on the degree of re-use actually being achieved at local government level in the UK pursuant to the Euro Directive on the Re-Use of Public Sector Information (Statutory Instrument SI...
2. PlanningAlerts.com — Opening up UK Planning Application Data Back at the Civic Info forum in November Richard Pope presented his initial work on scraping planning application data from local council websites. This was a classic case where the original providers of the data did not make it available...
3. What features should be included in a catalogue of open government data? There have recently been several posts about what features are desirable in government data catalogues. The Sunlight Foundation recently announced they are planning to build on data.gov to allow “community participation so that people can submit their own data sources”...